#Feminist theory

[trash-and-trash-accessories]

Good tags.

A lot of this comes from the belief that women have things easier. This is a common incel talking point and a belief a lot of people assigned male have about those assigned female. "Their lives are easier, they get sex easier, people are nicer to them." It's a pervasive enough belief that even people who don't think of themselves as misogynistic often have it in the back of their minds. But it's not true. The rights women have are a result of long difficult fights. Women suffered and died for those rights. And the trivial things people cite like "people are nicer" are just straight up sexist.

And people who believe this often extrapolate this to transmasculine people as well. Betraying that they don't see trans men as men. They may rationalize why they feel this way with feminist language but it's clear this is not a feminist belief. It's misogyny they've internalized by living in a culture steeped in it, which they are projecting onto people they see as women. And people need to examine why they believe the things they do and consider that maybe their feelings aren't rational but come from their unexamined biases. This is a clear case of that.

I do want to note that the whole "women are allowed to dress masculine and wear trousers" thing needs to be viewed in its historical context:

People fought for generations to be allowed to dress that way. They fought hard to be allowed to wear pants. Blue jeans were a symbol of feminist revolution. Women were barred from workplaces and schools for wearing them.

This is not some a natural fact that women dressing masculine is less shocking and humiliating. That normalization was fought for and hard-won.

And yet so many people erase the struggles of those people who fought to make that happen and pretend that it's just normal and natural that people don't see women "dressed like men" as ridiculous.

The Marriage of Figaro has what's called a "breeches role" which is a woman wearing men's clothes playing am ale role. This was done partly due to the vocal range requirements, but in many cases it was done comedically. It was risque and sexualized or comic relief that a woman was dressed as a man.

Anti-suffragette posters mock women wearing pants - well they were bloomers and split skirts back then - and mocking more masculine cut styles of clothes. This was meant to portray this as ridiculous.

They mocked the "new woman" in Weimar Germany, lamenting that they were too masculine.

This is a political cartoon from the 1920s depicting a woman in masculine dress deciding which bathroom to use:

Sorry but you're erasing these struggles and flattening history when you say this shit.

Women were killed and institutionalized in the struggle to make this happen. It really fucking bothers me the way it's framed as "people just don't find it as weird when women dress masculine."

Yes they fucking did. Until women and transmasculine people fought for their right to wear what they want. It's normalized because people struggled to normalize it.

And it's not normal everywhere. There are many countries where it's still illegal for women to wear pants. Sudan, Saudi Arabia.

Even in the US, it's forbidden and considered ridiculous in groups like the FLDS, the Amish, and the Hutterites.

We are flattening and erasing the struggles of women when we say these things. I know we're trying to build theory here but you can't build solid theory on a foundation of lies.

[agendercryptidlev]

[ID: Meme that reads "I bring a sort of "The Patriarchy was defined by Cis Feminists and the Definition Should be Updated To Better Represent the Lived Experiences of Trans and Intersex People" Vibe to Transfeminist Theory that Radfems don't really like" the background is a photo of a man with a backwards baseball cap looking into the distance while standing outside /end ID]

[yapoholics-anonymous]

"it's woman's responsibility to be assaulted correctly"

[hadesoftheladies]

some of you think your meek, patriarchal mothers never had any strong feminist attitudes in their youth and you do so to your own detriment. radicalized women have always existed. they were just neutralized by the patriarchal institution of marriage. that has consistently been one of the biggest threats to women's liberation and is the primary catalyst for women's widespread suffering in the first place.

[lilithism1848]

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

Someone smarter than me needs to do an in-depth analysis on how swift weaponizes sex. So many of her lyrics involve cheating as revenge and picking fights with her partners about other girls. She makes it sound like some godly privilege to be with her and if she masterminded her way into your life you're just soooo lucky. Even "touch me while your bros play GTA" plays into that. Like "why would you want to have fun and game with your friends when ill let you finger me". (Sidenote a bunch of her lyrics and all of Me! sounds like an abusive partner daring you to leave and dare to find someone better) It's creepy how she's so juvenile and egotistical at the same time. She's mastered the "any mention of my bfs, even the underage ones, is slutshaming" move and uses it to get out of any criticism. Like, have all the sex you want be safe whatever but don't act like some sad little girl who got taken advantage of when the game you started goes poorly.

Ask, and ye shall receive. Because this a very insightful observation! Thanks!

It is true that Swift clearly uses sex and sexuality like a "gotcha" moment. I was always quite perturbed by her songs that glorify cheating. It's just so strange, but I think it ties into her enjoyment of revenge fantasies. Anyway, I was planning to write about how Swift's music often engages with and reinforces heteropatriarchal social standards. I think your idea adds an interesting new layer to the ways in which she manipulates through sex- both in the performance of passivity to masculine authority, as the patriarchy, and the ways in which she commodifies female sexuality by weaponizing it.

You're right it's incredibly egotistical and juvenile.

Also, I have a major bone to pick with the way Taylor Swift uses feminism to shut down criticism- like OMG do I have a problem with her there. She's only ever spent her career crying about how "women who talk bad about me are bad women" yet, she never really does or says anything actually feminist. In fact, most of her music, like I said above, reinforces the patriarchy. She herself is guilty of so much slut-shaming, too. I will go into detail, with a real argument, in a separate post soon. And I thank you for pointing out the weaponized sexuality aspect of her, often, overtly patriarchal tone.

BTW- "ME!" is Such a weird song -> "I know that I went psycho on the phone" uhh... excuse me?

[fatgirlsaresmarttoo]

I’m sick and tired of the men who blame women for the lack of support/ resources for men’s mental health. They act like they haven’t exploited the emotional labour of dozens of women in their lives through traumatizing them with their emotional and psychological problems. They act like every woman has an army of people they can turn to when we’re feeling sad, that we don’t get misdiagnosed and abused by the medical system, that we’re not constantly being gaslit by therapists, counsellors, nurses and doctors. I want every man to feel empowered to better their mental health and be able to express their emotions but please stop oppressing us in the process.

(Edit: Since this is getting a bit of attention, I just want to clarify that I am NOT a radfem! I am in full solidarity with my beautiful trans brothers and sisters!)

To clarify: I was using this definition of emotional labour.

[rabiaticism]

"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present (...) Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won."

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

[misespinas]

“The most oppressed man finds a being to oppress, his wife: she is the proletarian of the proletarian.”

Flora Tristan, “The Emancipation of Woman, or the Testament of the Pariah” (1843)

[notsoanonymousfemcel]

marxist feminism

as much as i appreciate and agree with marxist feminism and what it has done for feminist theory and organizing, when they (Marxist feminists) start talking about how women's oppression stems from capitalism they lose me. the patriarchy predates capitalism, after the fall of capitalism patriarchy will still be here.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/specious

1 : having a false look of truth or genuineness : sophistic specious reasoning 2 : having deceptive attraction or allure 3 obsolete : showy

--

Noam Chomsky: If you look at what's happening, I think it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on. I mean, suppose you are a literary scholar at some elite university. Or, you know, anthropologist or whatever. I mean, if you do your work seriously, that’s fine, you know. But you don’t get any big prizes for it.

On the other hand, you take a look over in the rest of the university and you’ve got these guys in the physics department and the math department and they have all kinds of complicated theories, which of course we can’t understand, but they seem to understand them. And they have, you know, principles and they deduce complicated things from the principles and they do experiments and they find either they work or they don’t work. And that’s really, you know, impressive stuff.

So I want to be like that too. I want to have a theory. In the humanities, you know, literary criticism, anthropology and so on, there’s a field called theory. We’re just like the physicists. They talk incomprehensibly, we can talk incomprehensibly. They have big words, we’ll have big words. They draw, you know, far-reaching conclusions, we’ll draw far-reaching conclusions. We’re just as prestigious as they are.

Now if they say, well look, we’re doing real science and you guys aren’t, that’s white male, sexist, you know, bourgeois or whatever the answer is. How are we any different from them?

==

I worry that when I describe this idiocy as "fraud," people think I'm exaggerating, being hyperbolic or otherwise overstating it.

I'm not. If anything, I'm understating it.

All of this postmodern crap we're dealing with is completely fake. All this ridiculous intersectional jargon is a big grift. All of these domains producing this ridiculous nonsense are bogus and corrupt. All the scholarship they produce is fraudulent. It's fake from top to bottom.

All of it.

These people are cloaking asinine retardation in fancy words to cover up how asinine and retarded this asinine retardation is.

The people producing it are shallow and stupid. Not to mention, envious and spiteful about the status and authority of science. They just use absurd jargon to hide that fact and trick you into thinking it's too deep and profound for you to understand. But when it's decoded into simple English, à la the Tweet summaries above, the retarded, moronic nature becomes obvious.

The response to this kind of ridiculous shit needs to be laughter and derision, not tenure or a tertiary qualification.

We have to get rid of it because it's destroying our societies.

[femtheology]

The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone (Chapter 1) (1970). On Engels’ and Marx’s analysis of the patriarchy and where it falls short. On enlarging the analysis that is historical materialism

[lilithism1848]

[hairtusk]

Andrea Dworkin, 'The Promise of the Ultra Right', in Right-Wing Women (1983)

[out-of-the-forest-i-come]

Feminist Non-Fiction Recs

Because feminism isn't only about your own voice and your own rights, but about the liberation of all women, it's important to uplift the voices of women who are rarely heard. To honour this international day of Women's Rights, here are some recommendations for non-fiction feminist theory books centered on women of colour.

Please note that this is a non-exhaustive list, and that some very important works might not figure on it. Take it as inspiration, not as a binding list of works to have read, and remember that this is only the surface of women of colour's writings on feminism.

all of bell hooks' books, but I would recommend "Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism" to start with intersectional feminism

There Is No Hierarchy of Oppression; by Audre Lorde

Sister Outsider; by Audre Lorde (all of Audre Lorde, actually)

Hood Feminism; by Mikki Kendall

White Tears, Brown Scars; by Ruby Hamad

Mediocre; Ijeoma Oluo

We Should All Be Feminists; by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This Bridge Called My Back; an anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Bad Feminist; by Roxane Gay

I Am Malala; by Malala Yousafzai

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment; by Patricia Hill Collins

Arab & Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, & Belonging; an anthology edited by Rabab Abduhaldi, Evelyn Alsultany and Nadine Naber

Making Space for Indigenous Feminism; an anthology edited by Joyce Green

Beyond Veiled Clichés: The Real Lives of Arab Women; by Amal Awad

The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism; by Kyla Schuller

A Decolonial Feminism; Françoise Vergès

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower; by Brittney Cooper

Women, Race, & Class; by Angela Y. Davis

These books really only scrape the surface of an intersectional approach of feminism focused on race, and if you want to discover more works, I would recommend looking at intersectional feminism and decolonial feminism. Also, if you're not a native English speaker or if you speak fluently multiple languages, I recommend looking for feminist books originally written in other languages that may not have been translated to English, as they offer a perspective that is not so American-centered, which I feel is the case in too much of today's feminism.

[werewiire]

It was adult, white, wealthy males in this country who first read and fell in love with the Harry Potter books. Though written by a British female … J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are clever modern reworkings of the English schoolboy novel. Harry as our modern-day hero is the supersmart, gifted, blessed, white boy genius (a mini patriarch) who "rules" over the equally smart kids, including an occasional girl and an occasional male of color. But these books also glorify war, depicted as killing on behalf of the "good."

The Harry Potter movies glorify the use of violence to maintain control over others. In Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets violence when used by the acceptable groups is deemed positive. Sexism and racist thinking in the Harry Potter books are rarely critiqued. Had the author been a ruling-class white male, feminist thinkers might have been more active in challenging the imperialism, racism, and sexism of Rowling's books.

— bell hooks, The Will to Change